The invention concerns a roller bearing with roller elements constructed as rollers or balls arranged between an inner race and an outer race and with a thick-walled outer ring whose inner surface forms the outer race and whose outer surface is provided for direct rolling on a cylindrical or flat matching roller path and has a crowned (curved in longitudinal section) contour.
Roller bearings of this type are known as castors, support rollers and cam follower which, with their thick-walled outer rings, allow the transmission of high radial stresses to their matching bearing races, mostly curved disks or straight guide paths. The convex surfaces of the outer rings are crowned in shape in order to avoid additional edge stresses from alignment errors. Such a profiling is usually determined by a constant radius. Parallel to these crowned constructions, solutions with a cylindrical outer contour are also offered, which of course attain high edge loading even with small angle errors. Owing to the high radial stress, it is advantageous with outer rings with crowned contours to have as large a radius as possible in order to reduce the minimum Hertzian stress.
From published patent German application DE 42 00 381 A1, a roller bearing is known in connection with which not an outer ring, but rather the rollers used as roller elements are preferably constructed barrel-shaped. In the end regions, the contour of each roller is determined by a curvature radius r and then passes over at a fixed point into a cylindrical shape. The roller is here in any given case constructed as a hollow roller while the roller paths of the bearing races on which the rollers move are the cylinder surfaces of an inner and an outer bearing ring.
German patent DE 29 35 023 C2 shows a roller bearing in connection with which at least some of the rollers are provided with a convex surface which, in axial section, has at least three segments with different radii of curvature passing over into one another without sharp or rounded off edges along the entire roller contour. Furthermore, the segments have radii of curvature on both sides of the middle segment which are smaller than the radii of curvature of the middle segment itself. The bearing races of this previously known bearing are not, however, cylindrical, but are likewise constructed curved.
A thick walled outer ring which would be provided for rolling on a cylindrical matching roller path cannot be inferred from these two publications.